Roberty Bly, "Surprised by Evening"

There is unknown dust that is near us
Waves breaking on shores just over the hill
Trees full of birds that we have never seen
Nets drawn with dark fish.

The evening arrives; we look up and it is there
It has come through the nets of the stars
Through the tissues of the grass
Walking quietly over the asylums of the waters.

The day shall never end we think:
We have hair that seemed born for the daylight;
But at last the quiet waters of the night will rise
And our skin shall see far off as it does under water.

Closed Today

SACS is closed today.  Let's have our next formal response be due on Monday, and in class essay #5(b) will be on Tuesday. 

Here is a kind of sweet love poem, with a child as an intermediary, by an Indiana poet named Joe Mills.  Maybe you will like it.

The Return of the Openers

Today, the Feltron Report, a kind of personal annual report that a man named Nicholas Felton has been creating about his life since 2005, compiling and depicting statistics in ways that are surprising, illuminating, and often beautiful.

How does one go about reading something like this? 

What can we observe? 

Let's remember our four friends: Are there settings here?  What character elements are depicted?  What actions are represented?  How does the style of this project affect the attitudes and ideas it implicates?

Interesting interview with Felton from an episode of the great podcast Radiolab.  Starts 17'05" into the show.

All the Pretty Horses: A Harkness

APH Harkness Questions

First, a Note: Please bring your Perrine textbooks with you to class on Tuesday.  

For at least three of the questions below, try to have a thoughtful response prepared, and a page citation or two that will help back you up. 

These questions can be considered in almost any order, but my hope is that our Harkness discussion can touch on at least four of them in the course of 15-20 minutes.

Your discussion may also follow questions of your own that you bring with you or that occur to you in the course of your talk: “what’s the deal with” questions, or questions about a character’s motivations in a particular scene, etc.

1.      How is this novel a typical Western?

2.      How does it deviate from the myth?

3.      In what ways is this a Romantic novel?

4.      Does the novel undercut its Romanticism in any way? Is there anything in this novel, that is, that suggests a more tragic, realistic perspective on the western myth?

5.      Who has power/control in this novel?

6.      How do they wield this control?

7.      Is there a wilderness to be tamed? How is it characterized?

found on Kottke.org: an answer to the question "what is it like to have an understanding of very advanced mathematics?"

You are comfortable with feeling like you have no deep understanding of the problem you are studying. Indeed, when you do have a deep understanding, you have solved the problem and it is time to do something else. This makes the total time you spend in life reveling in your mastery of something quite brief. One of the main skills of research scientists of any type is knowing how to work comfortably and productively in a state of confusion.

John Ashbery, "At North Farm"

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you?

Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?